Dr Todd Borlik and an online Dr Alex Brown were the speakers at The Yorkshire Robin Hood talk and discussion at Huddersfield University yesterday.
Todd, a Shakespeare scholar with a special interest in Renaissance Ecocriticism put the tradition of Robin Hood’s death and burial in Kirklees into context. He mentioned that shortly before Shakespeare wrote As You Like It, set in the Forest of Arden, a Robin Hood play had been performed in the Rose Theatre, just across the road from the Globe.
Brown and Borlik
In his talk Riding the Wheel of Fortune with Robin Hood, Alex looked at how the fear of downward social mobility in post pandemic medieval England is taken up in some of the earliest surviving Robin Hood ballads, particularly in the story of the poor knight Sir Richard of the Lee in A Lyttell Geste of Robyn Hode.
Margaret Nortcliffe, our guide at Kirklees Priory and Robin Hood’s Grave
In the afternoon we got a chance to visit Robin Hood’s Grave and the gatehouse of Kirklees Priory, recently restored as a private home.
Stonecrop, viper’s bugloss, marsh woundwort, bream, banded demoiselle and a family of swans on our walk alongside the canal and the Calder today. Now we’re past midsummer’s day racken and bramble have grown up shoulder high, trees are in full leaf and on the riverside path, tall grasses are going to seed
Once known as Four Lane Ends, this is the view as it was in 1967 from Tithe Barn Street looking across Westfield Road to Jenkin Road, with Arnold Tattersfield’s newsagents on the left, Lee & Briggs ironmongers on the right. The fourth ‘lane’ on the near right is Manor Road.
I drew the little sketch that it’s based on while sitting at the Tithe Barn Street back entrance to the old Congregational Chapel (extreme left) while working as a teller when my dad was standing for Horbury Urban District Council. I had to politely ask every voter as they walked in for their number on the electoral roll. Towards the end of the day the local ‘independents’ (really Conservatives) would go around rounding up anyone who had promised to support them but hadn’t yet turned up.
The original of linocut was black on white but I like this reversed version, made by going for the wrong keyboard shortcut in Photoshop (Control+I instead of Control+Alt+I. After all these years I still get that wrong when I’m resizing an image). I’m currently re-scanning drawings of Horbury for a reprint of my local guide to the historic buildings of the town.
I was influenced by Daily Mail cartoonist Trog’s bold pen and ink drawings in the paper’s long-running cartoon strip Flook.
Apologies to our Yorkshire Party candidate, David Herdson, in the upcoming Wakefield by-election, as I’ve made him look a bit like me, however Barbara thinks he does look a bit like me anyway. Sorry about that David!
My first drawing using Clip Studio Paint in companion mode on my iPad. The linked iPhone acts as a remote control and you can toggle to the palette or to tool properties.
Watching Prehistoric Planet, launched on Apple TV this week, reminded me of the first book that I illustrated in colour, John Man’s The Day of the Dinosaur, published by Bison Books in 1978.
‘Prehistoric World’, Carroll Lane Fenton, 1957.
I can see the influence of a favourite book from my childhood, Prehistoric World, written and illustrated by Carroll Lane Fenton, in my drawing of Diplodocus but my use of colour was based on a method used by Frank Bellamy in his Eagle comic strips Fraser of Africa and Heros the Spartan.
The book designer thought their was something missing from this spread so he got me to draw the foreground Diplodocus and, in those pre-Photoshop days, he carefully trimmed it out and pasted it onto the artwork.
As the book was printed using the standard CMYK four-colour process, I used just three bottles of ink – red, blue and yellow – mixing them to get my greens, browns and – as Bellamy called them – ‘phoney greys’. But instead of the regular black for the line work, I used sepia brown ink.
I can see that I went a bit too much towards the brown with this title page. This shot of a smaller dinosaur scampering nervously beneath one of the larger species is used to good effect in Apple TV’s Prehistoric Planet and the designer of the book told me that the rough that he’d drawn for this spread helped them sell the project to a publisher.
My reference for the background for the title page came from my sketchbooks from one of the glasshouses at Kew and from my stints as a volunteer warden at the RSPB Loch Garten osprey reserve.
Looking at my first attempt at this Tyrannosaurus Rex attacking Corythosaurus, the designer said, ‘I want the kind of tension you get you try to take a bone from a dog.’
This was the best I could do.
Prehistoric Planet features at T. Rex that has just made a Triceratops kill and I have to admit they’ve caught that ‘dog with a bone’ tension in their CGI, with muscle and sinew convincingly present beneath the skin, but they do have a team of experts to help them. I had to make do with my brother Bill (off work on sick leave at the time) making up and painting every dinosaur plastic model it that I could lay my hands on.
I held the T. Rex model close to my eye to try and get the effect of it looming above the camera and I remember constructing a rough perspective grid to box in its proportions. I rotated my model of Triceratops to build up the herd.
In Prehistoric Planet there’s a sequence of the pterodactyl Quetzalcoatalus, nesting in a luxuriant tropical forest. It had been recently discovered when I illustrated the book and I imagined it in an arid savannah type setting, feasting on a brontosaurus carcass as vultures might gather at a kill today. I couldn’t work out how Quetzalcoatalus, the largest flying animal that ever existed, could then have taken off again, after it had filled up on food.
Prehistoric Planet makes its initial hop and glide look aerodynamically convincing.
Corythosaurus
As this was my first set of book illustrations in colour, it was a bit of landmark for me as I started on my freelance career and, to borrow them for an exhibition, I approached the publishers, Bison Books, then operating from a basement in Cromwell Place, just opposite the Natural History Museum. Could they look them out and take them round to the RCA Illustration Department just across the road, where the then head of illustration, Quentin Blake was organising the show.
No luck. I remember that managing director looking at me as if I was making an outrageous request.
So if you’re the current editor of Bison Books, and you happen to be reading this could I remind you that it’s about time that you handed back the originals please?
The Kentia Palm, Howea fosteriana, also known as the palm court palm or thatch palm is, as you might expect, a member of the Palm Family, Arecaceae, native to the Lord Howe Islands, which lie 500 miles to the north east of Sydney, Australia.
My thanks to Antonin from Evian (the town, not the bottled water company) for the French translations of items in the cruet at the Holmfield Arms.
Barn owl, tawny owl, little owl and Indian eagle owl breast feather.
At a Yorkshire Owl Experience at Horbury Library we were introduced to Amba, as scops owl from Central Africa, and Caspa, an Indian eagle owl who was in the process of moulting but I drew three of our native owls: barn, tawny and little owl (Jack, Dusty and Charlie).
Delivered today, my summer sketchbooks, and I’ve gone for five A5 landscape Pink Pigs. I’ve been working in 8-inch square and A5 portrait sketchbooks but I for me a landscape format works better for natural history, as you’re always in a landscape of some sort. My A6 landscape travel sketchbook can seem a bit cramped and A4 landscape can seem a bit too much to fill in one session but A5 landscape is right there in the ‘Goldilocks Zone’. Not too intimidating to aim at one page of natural history a day.
